Help:Interwiki linking on Wikimedia wikis: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 11:24, 12 August 2021

Revision as of 11:32, 12 August 2021

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Disadvantages of interwiki links:

* The wikitext is less portable across wikis, because wikis do not always have an interwiki prefix for the same sites and even if they do, the prefixes may differ

* There is no feature to find interwiki links, while searching for an external link can be done with [[Special:Linksearch]] (if installed). This is due to the fact that, while there is an [[mw:Externallinks table|external links table]], there is no such thing for interwiki links. The [[mw:interwiki table|interwiki table]] only stores the interwiki prefixes with their targets as function of the parameter, not the instances of the links.
** There is the {{ll|iw=mw|API:iwbacklinks|nsp=0}} query API that returns the pages that use the requested interwiki prefix.
** Using the general text search, to search for interwiki links, is more work for the server and therefore, it may be slow, not up-to-date or in busy hours, disabled. See also: [[Help:What_links_here#Finding_external_links_to_a_page|Finding external links to a page]].

* They're misleading because the user has no indication that they're being taken to a different site.